Nestled in the Meadows Museum of Art on the outskirts of Centenary College’s campus lies a cultural treasure trove of paintings by an artist named Jean Despujols. As an introduction to managerial changes at the museum, Despujols’s National Geographic layout of portions of his French Indochina collection has been re-created for the general public.

Escalating war in Vietnam is what attracted magazine writers Robert Moore and Maynard Williams to Despujols’s paintings in April 1951. “His canvases give the peacetime look of Indochina now darkened by the shadow of war.”

This juxtaposition is the angle the Meadows museum directors Lisa Nicoletti and Bruce Allen started from when piecing together the exhibition. Because the paintings have been housed in the Meadows since 1975, Nicoletti said, “Every time you put up a Despujols exhibit, you have to make it new.”

The collection not only takes the onlooker through a culture whose traditions have faded over time, but it also is like virtually walking into a National Geographic magazine with each painting’s description bordered by the well-known yellow cover and leaf-embellished outline.

To give the display another dimension, Despujols’s musical compositions are revealed through the help of Tom Hundemer, lecturer in music at Centenary College.

“(The music) certainly shows another fascinating aspect of Jean Despujols’s art and personality,” Hundemer said. “He was an artist of many talents, leaving a lasting impression on many people when he settled in Shreveport.”

A former student invited Despujols and his family to Shreveport, where he spent the rest of his days painting portraits and being a father, but Nicoletti and Allen were curious about what could have been regarding his career, which is reflected in the exhibition’s timeline.

Despujols was first recognized in 1914, when he won the Premier Grand Prix de Rome, which, according to Kent Davis in George Groslier’s “Cambodian Dancers,” was a prestigious contest begun in France hundreds of years ago by King Louis the XIV.

The prize was coveted by artists such as Delacroix, Moreau, Manet and Degas who competed but did not make the cut. The Prix de Rome was then a segue into its offshoot, the Indochina Prize, which Despujols won in 1936 and then donned his safari hat for full immersion into the Laotian, Cambodian and Vietnamese cultures. There, Despujols explained in his letter to the National Geographic, his “purpose was to penetrate far into the most inaccessible spots of the Peninsula” and paint a portrait of the people and their surroundings.

What is most remarkable about his travels according to Moore and Williams is that he survived a typhoon and painted in trying circumstances where he “sweltered in tropical humidity that made the drying of his paintings well-nigh impossible.”

“I am amazed at the number of materials he had to use; the conditions he must have been painting in,” Nicoletti said. Despite his obstacles, Nicoletti said Despujols “makes a very personal connection to places and conveys that to the viewer. You feel like you’ve traveled with him.”

The Indochina commission eventually landed the artist an exhibition of the collection totaling 338 works at the Smithsonian and then later the spread in National Geographic. Even though Despujols had many successes, his grandson, Shreveport local Trey Gibson, said, “Indochina was the pinnacle of his career, but I think it’s a more accurate statement to say that it was the event out of all of the amazing events in his life that penetrated deepest into his soul.”

After his death, the paintings ended up in Shreveport, thanks to Algur Meadows’s acquisition. Despujols wrote, “Because of its documentary and educational character, I hope it will find its final destination in a museum. For the museum is a window open to the vast world. It is the most democratic of institutions.” He received his wish.

Despujols’s exhibit labeled “The Calm Before the Storm” will be on display at the Meadows Museum of Art at Centenary College through April 20. Admission is free. For more information, call 869-5040.